Network News

Panel of Experts

Click on the faces for bios

In July 2007, Edward Ayers assumed the presidency of the University of Richmond. Named National Professor of the Year in 2003, Ayers has written and edited 10 books. "The Promise of the New South: Life After Reconstruction" was a finalist for both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. "In the Presence of Mine Enemies: Civil War in the Heart of America" won the Bancroft Prize for distinguished writing in American history. Ayers also created "The Valley of the Shadow: Two Communities in the American Civil War," a Web site that has attracted millions of visitors.Close

Ira Berlin, Distinguished University Professor in the Department of History, University of Maryland and the founder of the Freedmen and Southern Society Project is the author of four books on slavery, including, the multiple-prize winning "Many Thousands Gone: the First Two Centuries of Slavery in America."
Close

David W. Blight is Class of '54 Professor of American History and Director, the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery and Abolition, Yale University. He is the author of "Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory," and the forthcoming "Fivescore Years Ago: Searching for America at the Civil War Centennial."
Close

Historian, author, curator and educator, Lonnie G. Bunch, III is the founding director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture. He is working to set the museum’s mission, coordinate its fund raising and develop its collections. In 2002, President George W. Bush appointed him to the Commission for the Preservation of the White House.
Close

Ken Burns is the director, producer, co-writer, chief cinematographer, music director and executive producer of the landmark television series The Civil War which garnered more than 40 film and television awards, including two Emmys, two Grammys and the prestigious Lincoln Prize. This film was the highest rated series in the history of American Public Television and attracted an audience of 40 million during its premiere in September 1990.
Close

Gary W. Gallagher, the John L. Nau III Professor in the History of the American Civil War at the University of Virginia, is the author or editor of more than 30 books. His publications include "The Union War" (forthcoming, Harvard University Press, 2011), "Causes Won," "Lost, and Forgotten: How Hollywood and Popular Art Shape What We Know about the Civil War" (University of North Carolina Press, 2008), "Lee and His Generals in War and Memory" (Louisiana State University Press, 1998), and "The Confederate War" (Harvard University Press). Active in the field of historic preservation, he was a founder and first president of the Association for the Preservation of Civil War Sites.
Close

Brent D. Glass, director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, oversaw the renovation of the building in 2008 and and the addition of more than 20 exhibitions, including “Abraham Lincoln: An Extraordinary Life.” Before joining the Smithsonian, Glass was executive director of the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission in Harrisburg, Pa., from 1987 to 2002.
Close

Robert Lee Hodge is a reenactor who played a major role in the best-selling book "Confederates in the Attic," by Tony Horwitz, and appears on the cover. He has organized battlefield preservation fund-raisers and serves on the board of directors of the Central Virginia Battlefields Trust, an organization that has protected hundreds of acres near Fredericksburg. He is an Emmy Award-winning filmmaker who has also appeared in many historical films and TV programs and was a principal researcher on Time-Life Books 18-volume series "Voices of the Civil War" and "The Illustrated History of the Civil War." He has written about war-related matters for various publications.
Close

Harold Holzer, a leading authority on Lincoln and the political culture of the Civil War era, is Chairman of the Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Foundation, successor organization of the U. S. Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission, which he co-chaired for nine years. He is the author, co-author, or editor of 36 books, most recently "Lincoln President-Elect." Holzer has won many research, writing, and lifetime achievement awards, including the 2008 National Endowment Medal from the President of the United States. A former journalist, and political and government press secretary (for both Congresswoman Bella Abzug and Governor Mario Cuomo), Holzer serves as Senior Vice President for External Affairs at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
Close

Chandra Manning teaches 19th century U.S. history, including classes on the Civil War era, at Georgetown University. Her first book, "What This Cruel War Was Over: Soldiers, Slavery, and the Civil War" won the Avery O. Craven Award given by the Organization of American Historians for best book on the Civil War Era, won Honorable Mention for both the Abraham Lincoln Prize and the Jefferson Davis Prize, and was a finalist for the Frederick Douglass Prize. She is currently working on a book about slaves who ran to the Union Army during the Civil War, and then moved North.
Close

John F. Marszalek is the Giles Distinguished Professor Emeritus of history at Mississippi State University and the executive director and managing editor of the Ulysses S. Grant Association. He is the author of seven books and co-editor of the "Encyclopedia of African-American Civil Rights."
Close

Kate Masur teaches U.S. history at Northwestern University. Her research and writing focus on race and politics in the Civil War era. She is the author of "An Example for All the Land: Emancipation and the Struggle over Equality in Washington, D.C." (2010). She has also published articles on the famed 1862 African American delegation to Abraham Lincoln and on what northerners meant when they called fugitives from slavery "contrabands."
Close

Stephanie McCurry, the undergraduate chair of the history department of the University of Pennsylvania, is a specialist in 19th century American history, with a focus on the American South and the Civil War era. She is the author of two books on the Civil War South.
Close

Edna Greene Medford is a professor and chairperson of the Department of History at Howard University, where for the last 23 years she has specialized in 19th century U.S. history. She sits on the advisory boards of the Knox College Lincoln Studies Center (Galesburg, Illinois), the Ulysses S. Grant Papers (Mississippi State University), President Lincoln’s Cottage (Washington, D.C.) and the Abraham Lincoln Foundation. She is also a member of the Executive Committee of the Lincoln Forum, a national organization dedicated to the study of President Lincoln and the Civil War era.
Close

Mike Musick is retired from the National Archives in Washington, D.C., as Subject Area Expert for the U.S. Civil War, after 35 years with the agency.
Close

Waite Rawls has been the Executive Director of the Museum of the Confederacy since January 2004. He is a member of the Board of Visitors of the Virginia Military Institute, a Trustee of the Camp Foundation and a former Trustee of the Civil War Preservation Trust. A native of Franklin, Virginia, he joined the Franklin Civil War Roundtable at age 9. He has a BA from the Virginia Military Institute and his MBA and JD from the University of Virginia.
Close

Dana B. Shoaf is the editor of Civil War Times magazine and executive editor of Civil War Titles for the Weider History Group, the largest publisher of history magazines in the world. He has consulted on state and national Civil War projects and is a frequent speaker on Civil War topics.
Close

John Stauffer is Chair of the History of American Civilization and Professor of English and African and African American Studies at Harvard University. Among the leading scholars of the Civil War era, antislavery in particular, he is the author or editor of eight books and more than 50 articles. His most recent book is "Giants: The Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln."
Close

Dr. Craig L. Symonds, Professor Emeritus at the United States Naval Academy, was the history department chair from 1988 to 1992 and served as Professor of Strategy at the U.S. Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island from 1971 to 1974. He is author or editor of twenty-four books, including his 2008 book, "Lincoln and His Admirals: Abraham Lincoln, the U.S. Navy, and the Civil War," that won the Lincoln Prize and the Abraham Lincoln Institute Book Award.
Close

Professor Joan Waugh of the UCLA History Department researches and writes about nineteenth-century America, specializing in the Civil War, Reconstruction, and Gilded Age eras. Waugh has published many essays on Civil War topics, and her newest book "U. S. Grant: American Hero, American Myth" (University of North Carolina Press, 2009), was awarded the Jefferson Davis Book Prize from the Museum of the Confederacy and the William Henry Seward Award for Excellence in Civil War Biography from the Civil War Forum of Metropolitan New York.
Close

“A House Divided” is a blog dedicated to news and issues of importance to Civil War enthusiasts across the country and around the world. Blogger Linda Wheeler and a panel of respected Civil War experts will debate and dissect historical issues and explore new concepts. Wheeler will also report on conferences and seminars, find little-known battlefields and sites to explore, keep track of local, national and international stories of interest to readers and provide advice on upcoming events.About the Blogger

Brent Glass: Could the war have been prevented?

By
Brent Glass

Director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History

War is avoidable until the fighting starts. Therefore, it was possible to avoid -- or at least delay -- the start of the Civil War if President Lincoln had instructed Union troops at Ft. Sumter to not defend a federal property and quietly withdraw. This action might have given the advocates for peace more time to negotiate a peaceful settlement. An agreement between the U.S. government and newly formed Confederate States of America would have required the recognition of the former slaveholding states as a new nation. It may have required an extension of slavery into western territories perhaps using the boundary established by the Missouri Compromise of 1820 as the boundary line between free and slave states.

Delegates to a peace conference discussed a compromise of this sort at the Willard Hotel in Washington in February, 1861. However, this proposal failed to generate any serious support and everyone at the conference knew that President-elect Lincoln strongly opposed any agreement that resulted in the dissolution of the Union. His decision to protect federal property after his inauguration was symbolic of a deeper belief that the Constitution established a united nation and a single government and that states could not enter and leave that nation. His commitment to preserve the Union and his opposition to the expansion of slavery made it impossible to escape the conflict that began with the firing on Ft. Sumter.

Visitors to the National Museum of American History can find an interesting footnote to the beginning of the Civl War in the exhibition Abraham Lincoln: An Extraordinary Life. Lincoln's pocket watch is displayed along with a story about an Irish watch repairman, Jonathan Dillon. Mr. Dillon was cleaning the president's watch when he heard about the attack on Ft. Sumter. He wrote a short note inside the watch to commemorate the occasion with a hopeful -- and prophetic ending -- "Thank God we have a government!"

Our panel responds to the question: "Could the war have been prevented and if so, how?

You're asking the wrong question Mr. Glass. The more relevant question is 'When will Texas, North Carolina, and other states successfully secede?' The answer is, sooner than you think. The Civil War isn't as much a history lesson as it was a precursor. This country is as divided as it ever was. To pretend that doesn't spell trouble is to be smokin' some seriously good weed or be as naive as it gets. I'm not personally happy about it, but the quiet indicators are out there and the FBI knows it.

Sorry, Brent. That's a 'pollyanna-ish' view, by which I mean that power rules, then as is now. The Northern and border states with their increased industrialization and economic strength were rising on the world stage, and the immorality and cheap labor of slavery was intolerable to them. Slavery was intensifying in the South, esp in Florida. Also, the strong desire of most intellectuals was to keep the Union intact to prevent the continent from splintering into many quarreling nations like Europe. Such a peace conference meant negotiating with a weaker, immoral entity. And since the South and its business leaders weren't going to voluntarily/unilaterally give up their investment in slave labor, it had to be done by force.

Hattaway and Jones, in their book, “How the North Won: A Military History of the Civil War” have a marvelous end-note in their chapter entitled: The Symphony of Vicksburg, Tullahoma, Gettysburg. In that chapter’s end-notes they pose the hypothetical question of the consequences of a Confederate victory at Gettysburg, as complete and total as Marlborough’s at Blenheim.

They come to the conclusion that even if you grant that General Lee achieved a “Blenheim” in Pennsylvania; and, that as a result, it would only mean a greater many terrible tactical consequences for the Union. But Hattaway and Jones go on to observe that, if the fundamental purpose of the Civil War was to “…change the balance of power in North America…”, then, that was not possible, “…even if Lee had achieved a Blenheim in Pennsylvania…” Reading that, I raised a corollary question. What was this change in the “balance of power” in North America that the Confederacy was trying to achieve? And what would have been the consequences?

What the change in the balance-of-power that the Confederacy was trying to achieve, was to create a second, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant super-power in North America, and the Western Hemisphere. And since the French and Indian War there has been only one. And our hemispheric history has not been a story of next-door superpowers, like Britain-France-Germany-Russia.

Imagine that there was another nation state in the western hemisphere (much less North America) that presumed to be able to ally itself with any of the western European powers, or to join in alliances like the Central Powers, the Axis, NATO or the Warsaw Pact. All without regard to, and independent of, the national security interests of the United States.

From this perspective, the whole point of Civil War was prevent this from happening. The United States could not let the Confederate States of America (CSA) come into existence. The CSA could not exist or survive as an independent nation state with the kind of foreign policy of a Mexico, a Cuba, or a Costa Rica. Long before the Cuban Missile crisis the United States would have had to confront the possibly of an independent CSA forming political-economic-military alliances in contravention of the US’s Monroe Doctrine. For the Confederacy, there would have been the prospect of being forced to be a second rate Cuban style slaveocracy, which in essence had no independent foreign or national security policies at all.

Who would have controlled the flow of goods on the Ohio and Mississippi rivers? Who would the CSA states of Texas and Louisiana been “allowed” to sell their oil and natural gas to? What political factions in Washington DC could have allowed “foreign” military bases at Key West, Norfolk, and New Orleans?

What Government in Richmond could have tolerated a foreign policy that allowed ships from Philadelphia and New York naval bases to cruise from Hampton to Jacksonville, just to "keep the sea lanes open."

We encourage users to analyze, comment on and even challenge washingtonpost.com's articles, blogs, reviews and multimedia features.

User reviews and comments that include profanity or personal attacks or other inappropriate comments or material will be removed from the site. Additionally, entries that are unsigned or contain "signatures" by someone other than the actual author will be removed. Finally, we will take steps to block users who violate any of our posting standards, terms of use or privacy policies or any other policies governing this site. Please review the full rules governing commentaries and discussions.